MARK KRIKORIAN:
--
Good morning, I'm Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the Immigration
Studies, a think tank here in Washington that examines the impact of
immigration on the United States.

Senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy recently introduced bipartisan
immigration legislation backed by a wide coalition of business, labor,
and ethnic groups, which made a lot of splash and is likely to be the
immigration vehicle that ends up being debated, to the extent there is
any debate this year in Congress.

Unfortunately, the McCain-Kennedy plan, as well as President Bush's own
immigration proposals, which he unveiled last year, are based on a false
premise, that since the federal government can't quickly deport 10
million people, 10 million illegal aliens, the only alternative is
legalization, which in English we call amnesty. The question we want to
discuss today is whether we are in fact faced by the forced choice, the
Hobson's choice between amnesty or mass expulsions, or whether there is
another way. I'll talk about this first. My comments will be based on
the Backgrounder paper that's in your packets.

Responding to that paper as well as offering kind of general thoughts
they may have on this topic are two other people who have given a great
deal of thought to this issue. First, Greg Bednarz will talk -- will
follow me. Greg is now retired from the Immigration and Naturalization
Service as a 25-year-plus veteran of the INS -- started out as a lowly
inspector in Michigan and retired as deputy assistant commissioner for
investigations.

Then Roy Beck will offer his thoughts. Roy is a journalist, author, and
executive director of Numbers USA, which is the most sophisticated
activist group working on the immigration issue today.

So, to the substance of the issue: Are expulsion or amnesty the only
choices that we face in dealing with an illegal population of 10 million
or more? The answer is no. And happily, the third way -- the third
approach to this issue is in fact the only one that can actually work,
and that is to shrink the illegal population, to downsize it through
consistent, across-the-board enforcement of the immigration law. That
would involve deterring settlement of new illegals, increasing
deportations to the extent that we can, and I'd submit, most
importantly, increasing the number of illegals already here who are
persuaded to give up and deport themselves, that by doing that we can
reverse the trend of continual increases in the illegal population by
bringing about continual steady decrease in the illegal population, the
point of which is not just to curtail the new arrivals of illegal
immigrants, as I said -- not to limit the flow only but to reduce the
stock, as they say in statistics, reduce the overall number of illegal
immigrants so we shrink the problem to a manageable nuisance, which it's
always going to be, rather than a looming crisis that lawmakers feel
compelled, appropriately, to come up with some response to.

The analogy I would submit is to a corporation downsizing a bloated
workforce. They use a combination of tactics -- a hiring freeze, which is
to say limiting the number of new people admitted to the organization;
layoffs, the analogy of deportations; and new incentives to encourage
people who are working for the corporation, excess employees, to leave.
Now, this kind of strategy -- I didn't just make this up. I mean, it's
implicit in a lot of the legislation -- pro-enforcement legislation that
Congress has considered, the Real ID Act, for instance, which the
president signed recently, which dealt with standards for drivers
licenses, or the CLEAR Act, which has been debated now for a number of
years, which would systematize the relationship between local and state
cops and federal immigration authorities. But even though specific
measures like that are important, they're still tactics; they're pieces
of a larger puzzle, and what's needed is the overall blueprint for
success, the strategy that those tactics are a piece of in order to
place those tactics, those specific measures, in context for the public,
for lawmakers and even especially maybe for the enforcement personnel
who were doing the job so they understand what it is that their
day-to-day responsibilities are a part of.

So is any of this even possible? I mean, it sounds good but is it just
policy wonks building castles in the air? The fact is this is eminently
realistic, and we can see -- get a sense of how it would work from
looking at the churn, the natural churn that exists in the illegal
population already. The Immigration Service, in 2003, released a report
estimate of the illegal population, and one of the ways they came up
with that estimate was by looking at this question of churn, of people
coming and going in the illegal population. And their estimates were
that there is something like 400,000 people who stop being illegal
aliens every year. Some of them get green cards. Many of them -- some of
them are deported. Many of them leave -- they give up after living here
for an extended period of time and go home.

The problem is that something like 800,000 new illegal aliens settle
here each year, so that outflow is swamped by the arrival of newcomers
and so the total pool of illegal immigrants keeps going up. A strategy
of attrition would work to switch that relationship so that fewer new
people come in, more existing illegals leave the illegal population, and
we have an annual decrease. It's a realistic, sober approach to a
long-brewing problem that doesn't look for immediate magic solutions but
also doesn't just declare surrender, which is what Senators Kennedy and
McCain would do and what the Bush proposal also would do.

Now, I think it's important here to ask, why not mass deportations? If
we want to reduce the number, want to increase the outflow from the
illegal population, why not stage a rerun of the unfortunately named
Operation Wetback of the 1950s, which was probably the highest profile
example of this kind of mass neighborhood sweeps and roundups.

Now, random raids at workplaces and elsewhere are always going to have
to be conducted. They're an essential tool to make sure that every
illegal alien understands that at any time he can be deported and
detained, but mass roundups, neighborhood sweeps, this kind of thing,
aren't going to happen, and I think there are probably three reasons for
this. First, we just don't have the capacity to find, detain, and deport
10 million people in any short period of time. This is partly a
question, of course, of personnel, of transportation, of detention
facilities, but it's not just that. Over the past 30 years or so, all
kinds of new rights for illegal aliens have been invented. A cadre of
activist attorneys has developed whose goal is to obstruct enforcement
of the immigration law. And so it's just simply much more difficult to
remove illegal aliens than it was in the past. Congress can address some
of these problems -- increasing resources, radically streamlining the
deportation process -- but Washington has permitted the illegal alien
population to grow so large that simply arresting them all just isn't
going to work.

A second reason I think that we're not going to see mass roundups is
that even if we had the capacity to magically relocate 10 million
people, there would inevitably be some economic disruption. The fact is
that businesses have become addicted, to some degree, to this labor. The
degree of that addiction or dependence is wildly, I would say even
ludicrously, exaggerated by lobbyists, but it exists to some degree.
There are 6 (million), 7 million illegal aliens in the workforce. Our
remarkably supple and responsive and flexible market economy can deal
with their absence in relatively short order, but it's not going to
happen overnight. It's going to take time to -- the enforcement would
take time to unfold, and that works okay because it would give the
economy time to adjust.

The third reason I think we're not going to see mass deportations is,
frankly, an exodus of biblical proportions, millions of people driven
through the desert with a huge dust cloud behind them, is that it would
all be televised. It would undermine public consensus, public support
for enforcement in the first place. The media as it is is going to latch
on to every misstep by the government, which is inevitably going to
happen. Every unfortunate story of an illegal immigrant family, every
inconvenience to business, and mass roundups would create a
superabundance of these anecdotes and would almost certainly undermine
whatever political consensus had been developed in favor of immigration
law enforcement.

And none of this means that a new attrition strategy, a downsizing
strategy, wouldn't include a significant increase in deportations. After
all, to go back to the business analogy, layoffs would happen. They
would be important and essential. The thing is that the number of
deportations are already so low that even a big increase isn't
sufficient to address the problem. We only deport some -- actually
deport, remove from the interior of the United States something like
50,000 illegal aliens a year, and in fact, some of them are legal
immigrants who have committed crimes and made themselves deportable. So
the number of people who were illegal aliens, regular illegal aliens,
and were deported is actually even less than that. If we have 10 million
illegal aliens and we're only deporting 50,000 people a year, that would
mean we'd have to increase deportations 200-fold in order to deal
exclusively with the tool of deportation with this problem, and it's not
going to happen.

A more realistic goal of, say, doubling or tripling deportations -- heck,
quadrupling or quintupling them, important though it is, is simply not
going to have a big enough numerical impact to be the only tool that's
used, and because of that, self-deportation is essential.

Now, a question you might ask, will illegals even respond to a change in
the enforcement environment? This is one of these myths that illegal
immigration is going to happen no matter what, whether we like it or
not, and so we might as well lie back and pretend to enjoy it because
nothing we do is going to make any difference. The fact is that it does
make a difference. Illegal aliens respond to cues and to changes in
enforcement. A good analogy of this that relates specifically to this
issue of attrition or downsizing is the special registration program
that was instituted after 9/11. Non-immigrant visitors -- that is, people
who did not have green cards but were here on other temporary status
from the Middle East -- were from a number of countries, Islamic
countries, were subjected to a special registration program. They had to
come into the Immigration Service and present themselves, have their
information taken down.

Well, the affected nations -- of all these nations that were listed, the
country that had the biggest illegal alien population here was Pakistan.
And what we found -- and this seems to be confirmed from a number of
different sources -- is that once Pakistani illegal immigrants understood
that at least with regard to them, immigration enforcement was going to
be somewhat more serious and somewhat more systematic, that they started
leaving in droves. Thousands and thousands of Pakistani illegal aliens
left on their own. They deported themselves once it was clear that the
party was over. They took buses to Canada, they hopped on a plane back
to Pakistan or to the U.K. They responded to the change in the
enforcement environment.

So what would an attrition policy look like? It would combine two
things, clearly: regular conventional enforcement -- in other words,
arrests, prosecution of repeat illegal crossers, deportations, asset
seizures, what have you, but it would combine those kinds of tactics
with an expanded use of verification of legal status at a variety of
important points. In the paper I called them virtual choke points, to
draw the analogy to like a border crossing point. Another way of
thinking of it might be firewalls in the computer business. In other
words -- and the point is to make it as difficult as possible to live
here illegally.

As to the first area, the regular -- the sort of conventional enforcement
efforts, the first thing that we need more than extra border patrol
agents or extra Jeeps or extra plain-clothes investigators, the first
thing that has to happen is an unambiguous commitment from the White
House down to immigration law enforcement. The fact is no unambiguous
commitment like that exists now. And the only way anything like this can
work, regardless of the level of resources, is if we end the climate of
impunity for border jumping, for illegal employment, for fake documents,
for lying on immigration applications, and this kind of -- this ambiguity
regarding immigration enforcement has an extraordinarily demoralizing
effect on immigration enforcement personnel. Greg may be able to tell us
a little more about that.

And the fact is that the reverse -- a commitment to enforcing immigration
actually has a remarkably -- I don't know what the word is -- exhilarating
effect on immigration enforcement personnel, and we've seen an example
of that with the fugitive operations teams, which were set up after 9/11
to go after illegal aliens who had formerly been found deportable and
then skipped and ran off. You can see it when you talk to those guys
that they understand that their bosses actually value what they do, and
that if they succeed in doing their jobs, they won't be humiliated the
way immigration personnel often are when they try to do their jobs, but
they'll actually be rewarded and praised.

Other measures that would be required beyond the simple change in the
environment is resources -- things like more U.S. Attorneys and more
judges in border areas, the CLEAR Act, which I mentioned before, seizing
the assets of illegal aliens, however modest they are, in order to
create some kind of sanction for being an illegal alien. But measures
like that, and other ones, are designed to help the government actually
find illegal aliens and throw them out.

The other part of an attrition policy is this creating incentives for
self-deportation. Unlike at the visa office, or at the border, there is
no physical place that illegal aliens have to pass, or aliens have to
pass through to get access to our society. Once they're in, what we try
to do is create firewalls, create virtual border crossings, if you will,
and the point is to pick events that are important, essential to living
in a modern society but don't happen every day. It's not like cashing
your check every week at the grocery store, buying gas every few days so
as not to disrupt the normal functioning of society.

And the point there is not just to find illegal aliens to arrest them,
although that's going to happen. The main point is to make it as
difficult as possible to get through these firewalls and to live a
normal life. That's the rationale for the ban on hiring illegal aliens.
People have to work, so demanding proof of legal status when getting a
job would be one of those firewalls. We haven't enforced it but we have
the tools to do it. Again, it's a question of a commitment to enforcing
the law. There are other areas where that firewall concept needs to be
applied -- getting a drivers license, for instance. That's what the Real
ID Act was supposed to be about, though there's a loophole -- a
significant problem in it I think that we're going to have to revisit
it. But beyond getting a drivers license, registering an automobile is
another firewall, opening a bank account, getting a car loan or a
mortgage, getting an occupational business license. There may even be
other areas, other firewalls that we could put in place.

A significant element of this firewall concept -- in other words, what
makes it essential -- is secure identification. The Real ID Act was
Congress's attempt to deal with that because the drivers license is our
de facto national ID system, but also important is consular registration
cards, what Mexico calls the Matricular Consular card, which functions
as an illegal alien ID and can serve illegal aliens as a way of passing
through many firewalls, and rejecting its acceptance by U.S.
institutions is essential.

Attrition demands not only incentives to get illegals to deport
themselves, and not only efforts to detain people trying to get in, but
the corollary of that is not instituting policies that would spark even
more illegal immigration. And there are two things specifically I have
in mind here, and one is massive guest worker programs, which are, in
effect, simply recruitment programs for illegal immigration. The
president has called for an unlimited guest worker program to allow any
worker from anywhere in the world to take any job in the United States
at any wage. The Kennedy and McCain proposal is somewhat less sweeping
but still would provide for hundreds of thousands of new guest workers
from overseas every year. These kinds of programs are guaranteed to
increase illegal immigration.

And another aspect of the government's proactive recruiting of illegal
immigration is the legal immigration system, which in many ways is
simply a permanent rolling amnesty for illegal aliens trying to launder
their status and dealing with a couple of the most egregious aspects of
the legal immigration system. The visa lottery and the sibling category
specifically would be essential.

And finally, legalization, in English "amnesty," is something that isn't
even a legitimate topic for discussion until the broken immigration
system is fixed. Even then there are strong arguments against it, but
once we regain control over our immigration system, it is at least a
legitimate topic for debate as one possible way of tying up loose ends,
but even mentioning legalization before the system is fixed is
irresponsible and is subversive of any efforts at law enforcement.

And let me -- just my last point is that this isn't bitter medicine that
the public needs to be persuaded to swallow. Enforcement of the
immigration law isn't real popular among the elite -- there is some
research on this -- but actual voters across the political spectrum
support it. Alan Wolfe, who wrote, a year or two ago, "One Nation After
All" -- a sociologist -- found that the differences between legal and
illegal immigrants, that difference, quote, "is one of the most
tenaciously held distinctions in middle class America. The people with
whom we spoke overwhelmingly support legal immigration and expressed
disgust with the illegal variety," close quote. Harnessing that
sentiment can buttress a sober, reasoned policy of attrition through
immigration enforcement.

With that, let me pass it on to Greg and then to Roy. Greg?

GREG BEDNARZ:
Good morning. I'm going to do my best to give you an insider's
perspective, and granted, that will be somewhat narrower than what you
heard from Mark. My premise is that an attrition approach, the middle
way, hasn't been tried. I believe it can work with sufficient funding --
it doesn't have to be overwhelming funding but sufficient funding --
mission definition and, for real, strategic planning. And I'm going to
draw from public record info, and just for the record, from unclassified
recollection.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the old INS had as series of stovepipe
strategies. There was a border inspection strategy, a border patrol
strategy, a deportation strategy, an interior enforcement strategy,
which was really an investigation strategy. We had all these wonderful
stovepipes and there wasn't a lot of crosswalk back in those days.

Focusing on the interior enforcement strategy, which -- I mean, we try to
do what we know, and that's my background, INS investigations. Focusing
on that, the GAO's Richard Stanna, in 2002, testified before Congress
that INS faced significant challenges in staffing program areas,
providing reliable information for program management, establishing
clear guidance and promoting coordination within the INS. Three years
later he notes a need for mission definition, strategic planning, and
priority management in the DHS successor agency. The bottom line is that
in order to support an attrition approach, we need a comprehensive,
integrated immigration law enforcement strategy, and it should treat,
one, overseas; two, border; and three, interior matters. And this is
something that Mark had written about sometime back, an article on
terrorism in the National Interest Quarterly.

I'm going to concentrate on the third area, interior investigations, and
that takes nothing away from another area, deportation or what's now
known as -- its maiden name was deportation, now known as removals. But
when I entered on duty with INS almost 30 years ago, we had a little
over 900 agents in INS investigations to handle supposedly the 50
states. We were only in, I believe at that time, 39 states. We didn't
have a presence way back then in 11 states. INS investigations at that
time was the main interior enforcement component, and in this era they
share that with the Detention and Removals Office. The passage of the
Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 saw the total rise to about
1,650 and then small incremental increases would see the total rise to
about 2,000.

These 2,000 or so what are now called legacy INS agents with immigration
expertise would be folded into what is now called the Bureau of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement -- ICE. And that was in March of
2003. Quite frankly, the number still holds at 2,000 or maybe 2,200
investigations agents with immigration expertise. I understand that
there has been cross training for the customs agents, and they are ICE
agents; they do provide a common front, they do support each other, but
one has to remember that the customs people still have customs work to
do, too. Or I should say, the ICE agents. And I know I harken back to
another pre-DHS era, so bear with me on that.

But during that pre-DHS era, the 2,000 agents were roughly -- and I say
roughly because it could shift -- they were distributed to the following
activity areas: all of about 200 agents dealt with fraud issues; 300 to
400 with employer sanctions issues, 350-450, criminal aliens mainly;
another 300 to deal with all the alien smuggling that they faced. The
remainder were assigned to drug task forces, violent gang task forces --
and we did things before MS-13 with gangs, and there is a structure
there and there was a structure -- counter-terrorism and organized crime
task forces. So some of these activities go back to the '60s. Some of
them actually, if you go back into the archives, you'll see gang-related
activity going back to 1891, the start.

So looking at just one of those activity areas, immigration fraud,
during one year in the mid-1990s -- I believe it's fiscal year '96 -- we
at INS received 13,000 credible cases, which we received under priority
acceptance criteria. There are certain cases you can take. So those were
credible. Due to resource constraints we could only complete half, or
6,500 of those cases. One of those cases, Operation Desert Deception --
and I'm sure most of you know about -- had about 5,000 fraudulent Special
Agricultural Worker, or SAW, applications attached. And try to think of
the math here: 5,000 -- this is one of 13,000 cases. Some were smaller
but the numbers could really mount up for 200 agents.

These SAW cases resulted from the IRCA Act's amnesty provisions. In
fact, there were instances where we had people who would show up that
had never done a day's work in agriculture. They wouldn't know a baler
from -- well, heaven knows what, but they would go stop at some place,
rub dirt into their hands and then go take -- go to the interviews. And
the thing I think we should always remember, whenever you have a
benefit, fraud is going to result, and if you pass an amnesty, whatever
you do, you need to have related numbers of agents to handle that. But
in the past, I don't believe that happened, and I can tell you that Jack
Shaw, who is the former assistant commissioner for INS investigations,
gave detailed testimony to Congress on amnesty fraud on March 4th, 1999.
It was before Immigration and Claims. I'm not going to go into that
other than say search it out on the 'Net. It makes for interesting
reading.

But during each spring call budget exercise, we begged for anti-fraud
resources. And once again, to repeat it, 6,500 cases went down the road.
This is well documented. It was known to the top political management at
that time, and I can't help but shudder when I think about possible
sleepers, embeds, whatever, in just one year, and think of the
succeeding years. During the decade and a half of the 1980s to the
1990s, the INS Investigations Division made about 100 line-item requests
for fraud, counter-terrorism, resident agent offices, protective
equipment -- things like body armor for our gang task forces and
anti-smuggling investigators. And out of that, 80 percent of these
line-item requests, which were well-justified -- they were based on good
metrics -- were denied, either by INS top management, the Department of
Justice, OMB, or Congress.

We also saw requests back then for data mining. They've zeroed out.
Purchases of evidence -- and in the middle '90s we actually saw our
purchase of evidence budget plummet from in the millions of dollars to
$440,000 per year, and I believe that was fiscal year 1995 or '96. At
one point we were directed to remove the element title, prevent
entrenchment of illegal aliens from the annual priorities. And this is
my opinion that I'm going to give you -- it was my opinion, based on the
conversations I had at the time, that the optics were not good and would
draw attention to the unaddressed illegal alien population. That
incident supported my impression that there was no desire then to
support an attrition approach.

As of 1995, INS had no presence in nine states, and repeated efforts by
mid-level managers to establish resident offices in those nine states
were rebuffed by top political management in the 1980s and 1990s. Then
the 1996 Immigration Act required each state to have at least 10
immigration officers. Once again, top management made a preliminary
decision to place only non-enforcement information officers and benefit
adjudicators in the unserved states. A congressional enquiry, a quiet
phone call, caused the early decision to be changed, requiring that
enforcement officers would also be placed in those states. I often
wondered if the change would have occurred without congressional
pressure.

In 1997, the Congress created quick response teams in underserved areas,
which amounted to the creation of those resident agent offices that we
had requested as far back as fiscal year 1988. And the Law Enforcement
Support Center, which is a national resource center for state and local
queries -- they can send NLETS, or National Law Enforcement
Telecommunication System messages, directly, and query on aliens that
they have stopped, made road stops on. It was similarly funded in the
late 1990s after facing repeated denials of appropriated funds for
almost a decade. I hope you're beginning to see a pattern here.

Although I've been away from INS -- well, from the then-INS for almost
three years, it is my sincere hope -- and hope springs eternal and I've
got to believe that the folks at DHS are trying to address this, that
certainly the mid-level people and the careerists are trying to -- that
they're working on strategy and related budget and resource
enhancements, metrics, what have you. And the thing that -- just as with
INS, whether it's deportation agents, border patrol agents, or now DHS
ICE agents, CBP agents, what have you, the amazing thing is that they do
so much with so little. And with incremental increases -- decent
increases -- I mean, if we can spin up 30,000 people to do screening at TSA, we can certainly look at what we have in our immigration
enforcement components and do something about it rather than 2,000 here,
210 there -- really ridiculous numbers, but of course that's just my
opinion.

But whatever the reasons for a lack of a middle way, whether it's benign
neglect or not-so-benign suppression, the DOS, Department of State
consular officers, legacy INS, and legacy Customs, and border patrol
agents really deserve our support, but most of all the American taxpayer
deserves more than a token effort, or what I'm hearing is the
smokescreen of false dichotomies, surrender to totalitarianism.

MR. BECK: Well, I thank Mark for
your work on this, and I think it's excellent help to help framing this.
As you say, this is -- much of this has been thought about, discussed
among the lawmakers who have introduced legislation over the last few
years among the American leaders who have pushed for return of the rule
of law, but I don't believe it has been articulated into a clear policy
as you are trying to do here, Mark. And so I thank you for that.

I have a few suggestions as you work on this. One of them is an
overarching theme, which is to let relief for victims drive the
attrition -- relief for victims. I think that is a missing part -- a major
missing part of the philosophy on what we are doing with illegal
immigration.

My comments relate to three major points: number one, that the reason we
want to reduce illegal immigration numbers, the illegal population in
this country, is because it is a crime and it's not a victimless crime;
there are victims throughout society. Number two, and that is -- is that
like all victim crimes, crimes with victims or most of them, and
certainly like white-collar crime, which I believe it's attuned to,
illegal immigration is a business; it is a criminal business in which
everybody involved in it profits from it. And so the way to do
enforcement against it is to take the profit out of the business.

Number three is the problem of the American victims and there are tens
of millions of American victims. The smallest numbers of victims are
probably the ones who have directly lost their jobs to illegal aliens or
who can't find a job because illegal aliens have stepped into those
jobs. A larger number are Americans who are working alongside illegal
aliens and have seen their wages and their working conditions be
depressed because of that.

Even a larger number are those who are in the overall occupations; they
are seeing their occupations collapse and wages depressed. The largest
number of American victims are the communities as a whole of seeing
their quality of life decrease. This has to do with overcrowding of
schools, deterioration of resources, raising of taxes, congestion in all
forms in parks, traffic, you name it. The fact is there are tens of
millions of American victims.

And I will say this that every time that I have mentioned anything about
the attrition approach on TV, instead of the mass deportation approach,
I get massive protests in terms of e-mails and phone calls from American
victims accusing me of selling out. So I think we need to address that
issue about, you know, is attrition enough to sway their very real
concerns of these tens of millions of American victims.

Well, to fill in those three points, I think Greg has provided us a very
good insight into the mythology that the open-borders people have
promulgated, which is that -- you'll hear this a lot -- we have tried the
enforcement approach, we have tightened and tightened and adopted more
and more draconian measures against illegal immigration and look what we
have got -- we have just added another -- another million come in every
year and with the net increase of a half-a-million. So we've tried the
enforcement; now let's try a different form of this, and the form is
massive guest-worker programs and legalize the illegals who are already
here.

Well, as Greg has pointed out, no, we have not tried massive enforcement
but we have done this: we have increasingly put up barriers on the
border and we have increased a lot of the penalties on the books. But we
have at the same time done is emasculated interior enforcement; there
are almost no workplace raids, almost no fines against employers. There
may be fines in the books but nobody gets fined; there are very few
deportations; and -- and this is one of the big important things -- we
have pressed six amnesties since the '86 amnesty. In the '90s, there
were six more amnesties between 1994 and 2000.

So our -- when you think about what plan we have had for illegal
immigration, it is -- it is basically this: we will make it increasingly
difficult for you to cross the border and try to ensure that those of
you who do try, that more of you will die while you are trying to do it.
But if you get across the border and get a good 100 miles into the
interior, there is almost no chance that you will ever be deported as
long as you don't commit a violent crime, and after a few years, there
is good chance that there will be some kind of an amnesty for you.

That is the recipe for why we have -- the Census Bureau now says, you
know, it looks like we have at least 12 million -- I think that is fairly
conservative -- but 12 million illegal aliens in this country. What Mark
is proposing is that we actually have enforcement; something, as Greg
says, we haven't done.

I have already made the point about victimless crimes. I think it's
important though to point out that there is a tremendous philosophical
difference between the McCains, Kennedys, the Brownbacks, and the Bushes
in the way that they look at this. It's really impossible for me to
believe that they could be so callus as to understand the victimization
and ignore it. I tend to think that they have convinced themselves that
illegal immigration creates no victims. There is almost no other way you
could justify the kinds of plans that they come up with. They have just
turned a total blind eye to the victims. I think the polls show the
majority of American people know the victimization; the attrition model
is based on the fact that there are victims.

I have said for many years that I believe the most common -- the most
true analogy for illegal immigration is burglars and burglary, and that
is most burglars do not enter homes with the intent to harm the
homeowner; they enter the home with the intent to take -- to increase
their material standard of living and to get in and get out and, you
know -- their intent is not to harm. And they do, as I said before --
illegal aliens -- they are wage thieves, they are quality-of-life
thieves. These are the results of their coming here illegally but they
are not the intent.

I think if we're going to manage this, we have to look at this as a
law-enforcement standpoint, and there are three -- there are three keys
to how a burglar decides to illegally break into a house and steal
something. The number one thing is what are the rewards and magnets? You
don't burglarize a place if there is not a great enough reward. So that
is number one. Number two, what is the barrier's entry -- how he is used
to getting in and out. Number three is what is the potential for
penalty?

Now, you apply this to immigration and the issue -- as you can take I
believe -- every one of the -- and I believe there are probably at least
30 significant things that need to be done for the attrition model to
work like gang busters, and you can put every one of those in those
three categories. Removing the rewards and the magnets -- the number one
thing for removing the rewards and magnets is to make workplace
verification mandatory.

Two years ago Congress extended voluntary workplace verification, the
SAVE program, to all 50 states; it's working great, but it only works
for the companies that want to obey the law. The companies -- the
employers that are the scoundrels don't have to use it so it is a
tremendous disadvantage to the patriotic, law-abiding businesses of this
country. So it's even -- we should even the playing field for most
businesses in the country and make sure every employer does the
workplace verification.

I want to emphasize two more things about magnets and that is -- Mark
mentioned them but we often don't think about this -- and that is chain
migration and lottery categories. The two categories of legal
immigration that the bipartisan joint national commission on immigration
reform said it should be eliminated, and they said it should be
eliminated because these people are brought in for no purpose, no
national purpose, no economic purpose, not any regard to their skills or
whether we need their skills.

But they also should -- these two categories are huge generators for
illegal immigration. Every year, 10 million foreign nationals apply for
the lottery; 50,000 win the lottery, but like most people who play the
lottery, they start to have an idea that they could win someday and this
builds in a sense of entitlement. So you have got tens of thousands of
--
I would say tens of thousands of people in this country who have played
the lottery and decided that they will go ahead and move here because
they get a chance to win some day.

Chain migration -- there are millions of extended family relatives that
are on the waiting list; some of them are on a waiting list that will
probably last 20, 25 years, but once they are on that waiting list, they
believe they are entitled, they have met the criteria to be in this
country, it's just they haven't come up on the list. So we have got
hundreds of thousands of people in this country who are on the chain
migration list who have decided to come on in. We should get rid of
these two magnets; they serve no national purpose and they increase the
rewards or the magnetism that brings people in.

One more thing about removing magnets -- and you have touched on this
Mark. Every time I mention this I get a lot of ridicule but I say that
one of the three most important things that could happen for attrition
to take place is for the president of the United States to go on TV and
actually make an address and say to those of you who are in this country
illegally, I want you to know you are not welcome and we want you to get
your affairs in order and in an orderly we want you to move back home
because you're not supposed to be here.

And to carry that a little further, a federal advertising -- public
service advertising campaign in the languages of the major illegal alien
groups to make that clear. Most illegal aliens believe that our federal
government wants them here because almost every utterance that comes
from our -- (audio break, tape change). That is the magnet.

In terms of increasing the potential penalty, three quick things; one of
them, the Clear Act has this and that is a mandate that the federal
government has to cooperate with local governments. Most of the media
attention is the opposite; it's about whether the local government has
to cooperate with the feds. I don't think that is a very important part
of this. The really important part of this is that the feds have to
cooperate with the locals.

We have local governments all over the country begging the feds to pick
up illegal aliens that they have run into and detained, but the feds
will not pick them up unless they kill somebody. So if we had a
situation where the illegal aliens thought that they could randomly run
into local law enforcement at any time and suddenly find themselves in
deportation proceedings, and that the federal government would respond,
that would create a tremendous amount of voluntary -- certainly a lot of
concern among the illegal immigration community and I think it would
push people to voluntary leave.

We have got to -- also, we have got to take the profit out for illegal
aliens. We can't just have them be picked up, sent back home, come right
back; they have got to lose a lot of money in the process. That is why
we need to have forfeiture of assets; we need to have fines that the
second time and third time they are picked up -- start to sound a little
draconian but the point is they are involved in a criminal enterprise,
take all of the reward out for them.

Now, of course, the primary criminals in the illegal immigration racket
are the employers. We have not -- I think part of the problem is we have
got good fines and penalties and -- you go to jail but nobody wants to
send a businessman to jail. I think that probably we need to redirect
our attention not so much to the penalties as to disrupting their
businesses; that is, everything that the federal government does with
business ought to be done in terms of how can we just do things like fly
helicopters over businesses if we know there are illegal aliens, that
kind of thing -- in other words, constantly disrupt businesses like you
disrupt open drug markets.

And then here is the point that I don't believe has been -- there is
nowhere in the law yet -- no bills have been introduced -- I think it is
very important -- that is -- it's how we relate to the victims themselves
and that is, do they have to wait for 20 years for illegal immigration
to disappear? Well, maybe that is what it will take for the country as a
whole, but if you're a community that feels victimized by illegal
immigration, the law should be such that you can be rid of illegal
immigration in the next year. That is -- that is why the Clear Act works
so well; it allows any local community to decide we are going to make it
so that illegal immigrates simply don't want to stay in our community.

We have got to create a situation in which businesses can file
complaints and ask for relief from the fact that they have unfair
competition from businesses that hire illegal aliens. That is, let the
victims themselves determine where the DHS is doing workplace raids. If
you have got an occupation where all of the businesses are happy
competing with illegal labor, then -- and you don't have enough troops to
do all of the workplace raids, put the raids where the victims are
asking for it.

And then, finally, set up a situation in which groups of workers who are
being victimized can file for relief from their occupations. Use the
force multiplier of all of these victimized businesses, all of these
victimized workers. Let them become a major part of the DHS forces to
bring about a much more rapid attrition. Thank you.

MR. KIRKORIAN: Thank you, Roy.

I am happy to take questions for any of us. State your name, who you
are, where you're from, that sort of thing so we can ask -- you first,
sir, and then you -- yes. Yeah, go ahead. No speeches please. I need a
very short statement with a question mark at the end.

Q: Well, just what do you think of
the -- (off mike) -- what do you think of the -- (off mike) -- of very
violent members of gangs -- (off mike) -- gangs in the United States?

MR. BEDNARZ: Well, it's obviously a
response -- it's a law enforcement responsibility and at this point, the
amount of resources devoted to gangs are very small but the solution to
that is target some resources, ask for them, and that is -- apparently
at this time I know the DHS/ICE is concentrating on MS-13. There are
other gangs other than MS-13 out there; there are a lot of them and it's
not just Latin gangs. Over the years, we have dealt with -- you name the
country, it had a gang; it had non-traditional organized crime. So even
though I have been gone for three years, the bottom line is that it's a
resource issue; they are targeting, but we also need feedback and
reports from the agency on this.

Q: Thank you.

MR. KRIKORIAN: I would just like to
add something to it quickly and that is that as important as going --
devoting immigration enforcement to your major sort of obvious criminal
problems, that isn't going to really get at the whole problem because
this is the insight of broken-windows policing: if you're only waiting
for somebody to murder or rape, you are never going to be able to
prevent crimes in the future. The idea of broken-windows policing, which
is what Giuliani did in New York, was to reassert control over all, to
go after people jumping over the subway turnstiles, and drinking in
public because you're going to, number one, uncover a whole lot of real
bad guys; number two, restore a sense of order and end this climate of
impunity where people figure they can get away with this kind of thing.

Q: Thank you.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Yes, ma'am, and then
you.

Q: (Off mike) -- you said groups of
workers who feel that they have been -- (off mike) -- you mean suing the
government?

MR. KRIKORIAN: Well, if you could
sort of kind of repeat the question.

MR. BECK: Yes, the question was my
comment on groups of workers who are victimized by illegal immigration
--
to be able to file for relief and the question was -- I mean, sue the
government. What I think we need is we need administrative procedures in
which they file -- not suing the government but basically filing, putting
the government on notice, and having a responsive government -- that you
don't have to sue the government; the government will actually do
something.

But I do -- there is a sort of a suing nature of it because what we do
know is that the federal government for the last 25 years has colluded
with the criminal enterprise. They have made hundreds of little
decisions and sometimes major decisions to keep the flow of illegal
labor going to illegal businesses. I do not trust -- I do not trust any
law that could be passed that the federal government would enforce it if
it means hurting the businesses that want the illegal labor unless we
put something in there that allows businesses -- aggrieved businesses and
aggrieved citizens, aggrieved workers to have a formal process of filing
and -- these need to be highly publicized. And, yes, in the end -- in the
end there needs -- there probably does need to be something that allows
for suit. But my hope would be that it is an administrative process.

MR. KRIKORIAN: First you -- no, yeah,
Chip.

Q: Some people say the devil is in
the details -- (off mike) -- it sounds like salvation is in the details
here. And I wondered -- you mentioned 30 things that need to be done. I
would like to see that list. Do you have a list like that?

MR. BECK: You would like to see a
list of 30 things too --

Q: Thirty things that -- (cross
talk).

MR. BECK: Yes, 30 things. It may be
27, it may be 31, but --

MR. KRIKORIAN: You don't need to
list them all now.

MR. BECK: No, I am not going to.
(Laughter). But I think that that is exactly where -- I saw this panel
when Mark suggested he was going to put this panel on as being a little
bit different than some of the panels where it is the finished product;
it's a beginning. It's a long way along in the thinking but to put these
lists together and I would hope that maybe in the next two or three
weeks, we will be able to have some things on websites that -- we'll
certainly at Numbers USA be doing something like that.

Q: And I would like to see it broken
down into --

MR. BECK: The three burglary
categories.

Q: Well, the ones that could be done
by executive -- (off mike, cross talk).

MR. BECK: That is a good one for
CIS.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Well, I have to say
you could check out the May 23rd edition of the National Review for a
breakdown of some specific items in a piece that I wrote for the cover
story.

Yes.

Q: My name is Andrew McDevitt. I am
with the American Payroll Association. I represent 21,000 payroll
professionals and my membership is tasked with the complying with the
employment tax laws, recording W-2 information into your IRS, Social
Security, enforcing child support laws, making sure garnishments are
completed for child support enforcement. And what I heard on the panel
earlier is the possibility of employers playing a larger role in the
immigration enforcement laws. I want to hear more about that and how
that would impact that, and how we could do that with the least
administrative burden because the folks that I represent, they want to
comply with the laws that they are tasked at complying with in their own
employer's environment.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Well, the question
was how can employers that want to comply, which frankly is most of them
-- how do they actually comply? And the fact is that since 1986 there
hasn't been a good way for employers to comply with the immigration
requirements. In 1986 Congress for the first time ever prohibited the
employment of illegal aliens but pulled its punch and didn't mandate the
development of some way for employers to actually know who was legal and
illegal and they fell back on looking through a flurry of documents
easily forged, insecure documents in many cases, and then, to top it all
off, said that employers that looked too closely at the documents would
be sued by the Justice Department for discriminating; in fact, many
employers have been fined for looking too closely at documents in the
immigration process.

So I would have to submit -- and I would love to hear other thoughts on
this -- we need to expand on the voluntary verification system that
exists now; it's an online system that the immigration service has been
playing with. I am sure there are improvements that could be undertaken
in this. So clearly the capacity needs to be ramped up but the
businesses that have used this have been happy with it, and making that
mandatory and expanding it seems to me the first step in helping
business do what frankly they want to do anyway, which is just
incorporate this into their normal hiring procedures so they don't have
to become immigration agents any more.

Q: And I think what I am seeing out
there is -- I mean, the larger employers have means -- (inaudible) -- doing
this but the medium and smaller employers -- there have to be some tools
that make it easy for them -- that this -- the government is really going
to take a serious stance on this to have the opportunity to make sure
that they get he appropriate things to ensure that they are trying to
comply with the laws that aren't set.

MR. KIRKORIAN: Well, that is why
there is a -- I mean, you can now go to uscis.gov and sign up for the
pilot program.

MR. BECK: The comment about is it a
-- especially smaller- and medium-size businesses need a process that
works well. Numbers USA is a small business; we have 12 employees and we
have joined the SAVE program and we have had a couple of hires, we have
used it. It is kind of important that we not be hiring illegal aliens.
(Laughter.) And I can just say as a small employer, it's a perfect
system. It just took a few minutes to join the program and then when we
actually hired somebody, it was -- I don't think it even took a minute. I
mean, it was -- (snaps fingers) -- just like that. And it's the
reassurance that you have got -- that you have done something that the
federal government has basically said you have done what you need to do.

We believe, by the way, that a lot of the paperwork requirements that
have been out there and the document fraud expertise that -- we think we
need to change that. I mean, I think overall, we need to make it easier
for businesses so that businesses have less to do because really most
businesses are not the problem here; we need to know -- as you say, most
businesses want to obey the law. Make it easy for them to do but make
sure that the net is cast for everybody.

MR. KIRIKORIAN: Let me just add, we
also signed up for the verification program at CIS but we're even
smaller and haven't hired anybody -- (laughter) -- in the interim yet.

Yes, sir, you in the back and then -- no, no, no, he had his hand up
first, sorry. You will be next, sir; you, sir, in the light green shirt.

Q: Okay, my name is -- (off mike).
Both you and Roy Beck talked about how the illegal -- how illegal
immigration enforcement -- (off mike) -- you also mentioned how most
Americans support illegal immigrants. And you talked about the negative
effects that -- (off mike) -- I can't think of any of them -- (off mike).
So to what extent do you think that fighting illegal immigration -- (off
mike)?

MR. BECK: The point was it sounds
like -- to the questioner -- that most of the things that we said that
were wrong with illegal immigration could also be applied to legal
immigration and how does all of that fit together, and it is a very
perceptive comment because I believe it's true because the main problem
with illegal immigration is not that the people are illegal but that
they are present, period; it is the numbers. And so the fact that we
have -- we're brining in over a million legal immigrants a year and then
around a million illegal immigrants a year that are settling, that is
around 2 million people. It is the 2 million people in the workplace.

If illegality was the main problem, then amnesty would be the answer
because then you just have legalized the people but the fact is is that
the competition is -- and the victimization is still there for the part.
Now, I mean -- there is no question illegal immigration is much worse
than legal because in that case the illegal aliens are at fault. The
problems from legal immigration, the legal immigrants are not at fault
at all; they are simply taken advantage of something we offer, but the
problem is we need to have a -- as the Jordan Commission, the bi-partisan
commission, said in the mid-'90s, we need an immigration policy on
illegal and legal that bring the numbers -- the numbers down -- Numbers
USA -- that is why we call ourselves that -- (chuckles) -- but it is to
bring the numbers down to a level that does not create unfair
competition for American workers and does not unfairly add to congestion
and other infrastructure problems for the American people as a whole.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Let me just add to
that and then we'll take a couple of questions and wrap it up. But the
point though is that there are some legal immigration categories that
are uniquely structured to promote more illegal immigration. That is why
I specifically highlighted the lottery, which actually generates new
flows of illegal immigration from places where they didn't exist before,
and that is the whole point to the visa lottery because it is designed
to promote immigration from places where there isn't much immigration
from.

And then the chain migration idea -- if you adopt a young child from
China, that doesn't promote chain migration. If you have a category that
brings in the adult sibling of a U.S. citizen who is married and has his
own kids and his wife has parents and his wife has her own siblings,
that then creates chain migration in which -- can in fact -- is an engine
for illegal immigration in a way that maybe other legal immigration
categories aren't.

Let us just take two more. Sir, you in the back first. Yes. In the green
shirt, in the green sweater.

Q: My name is Brian (?). I am
retired. I was chief of border patrol in the '80s -- (off mike). The
point Greg made about -- I was in the immigration service in '86 when --
(off mike) -- issued and Greg's point about -- (off mike). The thinking at
that time as I perceived it was that we were going to go after
sanctions, we were going to go after -- (off mike) -- and in fact, as
chief of the border patrol -- Greg mentioned he had picked two out of
hundreds -- there are about -- (off mike) -- is totally inaccurate.

I assigned 600 of the border patrol uniform to do interior -- (off mike)
-- that is how enthusiastic I was, but I retired in '90 and -- (off mike,
laughter) -- I opened up interior border patrols in Houston, Dallas
because I saw -- (off mike) -- and I worked it out with Jack Shaw, the
head of investigations, that together we -- that was the magnet that was
pulling -- the jobs were puling the people in so as we deterred that, I
opened the station -- (off mike). But there was a policy at senior levels
that wanted to negate any actions that Greg -- (off mike).

MR. KRIKORIAN: And I think the
important point here is that the 1986 amnesty had a deal at the center
of it which is essentially what McCain and Kennedy are trying to sell,
which is enforcement in exchange for an amnesty. In other words, that
there is a grand bargain -- that is the way the 1986 measure was
proposed, and what happened was it was a bait and switch -- is that the
amnesty happened up front; the promises of future enforcement never
materialized and frankly --

MR. KRIKORIAN: The promises are much
thinner -- (laughter). Studies and focus groups and interagency task
forces -- I mean, it's a -- so the point is it's a similar attempt but
it's even thinner than the previous bait and switch. And as a wise man
once said, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

Q: Unfortunately (?) I believe that
at the time. (Laughter.)

MR. KRIKORIAN: Well, I understand.
Let's take one last question. Yes.

Q: Greg -- probably in an allied area
-- how do cities, say, such as a Denver, get away with creating
sanctuaries that effectively harbor illegal aliens, and also, from the
standpoint of the other cities where police forces are absolutely
forbidden for having the interface with the INS as it relates to the
removal of the illegal aliens?

MR. BEDNARZ: Well, I can't really go
to the motives of how or why but the fact is we have to deter that, we
have to fight it in the future. If that means embarrassing people, well,
so be it, but there is no question that in the future we will have to
push for state and local and for the federals to come back and pick
people up when they get the call and they have the resources to do it.

Q: Thank you.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Thank you, Greg. I
can't speak for the other guests but I am happy to be accosted
afterwards if people have further questions. I appreciate everybody's
coming and all of our work -- let me just give a last plug -- the Center
for Immigration Studies' work is all online at cis.org for anybody who
is interested. Thanks a lot.